Back in 2001 everything was feeling rather fuzzy and the days began to segue into each other thanks to the overwhelming powers of diamorphine. I was conscious almost all the time as I hadn't quite got the hang of sleeping upright (to prevent acid running up into my throat) and I was starting to have rather graphic nightmares. I normally don't remember my dreams but these were so very vivid and each and every one of them involved either a friend or a family member dying in really grisly circumstances. I care not to repeat them but suffice to say sleep didn't come easily for me the whole time I was on it.
So I was sleep deprived and basically off my face on drugs so anyone visiting me or phoning me got a very weird version of me to deal with. Trying to think about it now it all seems a bit foggy and I know I found it incredibly frustrating not really being in command of my thoughts but I tried desperately hard not to let it upset me. It only really upset me when circumstances dictated that visitors I was expecting couldn't make it. I remember Sam being unable to make a trip through due to snow which annoyed me because any other time she had visited there had been loads of folks around. She was always someone who I could tell how I was really feeling but I always chose not to when other people were about. Some other visitors had to miss out because they were infectious as well and that is always a blow, even though you know it's for the best.
In those first weeks post transplant there is a strict two person per room visitors rule, although in there they can come and go as they please during the day. I had a regular stream of visitors which was fantastic and they all offered something different for me. Some want to know about everything down to the most minute detail and some want to know nothing apart from the big picture but most reside somewhere in the middle of that and you have to find out where each one lies, which kind of keeps the mind active.
I struggled to concentrate the whole time and found it incredibly frustrating but I found that reading court room dramas (courtesy of Dave) were at just the right level of interesting to give me a bit of enjoyment without the frustration of being too difficult to follow. Thank God that boy buys his books in airport bookstores I say.
They say that pain reminds you that you're alive. Having in those days felt as much pain as I had in my life followed by the greatest numbness of my life as well I have to say that the person who comes up with effective non-opioid analgaesia will be the most popular person in the history of medicine. A pain relief that doesn't involve all the side effects of morphine and its derivatives will be a huge advance for hospital patients worldwide.
We studied industrial attempts to design such molecules in one of our courses in Medicinal Chemistry at Uni and it is still the Holy Grail of the subject.
I've not even mentioned stopping taking it yet. That's a whole other issue altogether.
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